The Martial Unity

Ordinarily, Muspelheim was a domain that relied on vibrations and pressure to generate heat. However, because her friends were immediately around her, Ria altered the perimeters of the domain, making sure that the domain commenced outside a certain amount of radius.

FWOOSH!

Even her friends watched with amazement as she finely altered the parameters of the field of influence of a very sophisticated domain technique to exclude them. Instead, the domain primarily affected the macrobes that charged towards them.

RUMBLE!!!

The fireball was tremendously massive and bright, visible from a great distance away. Its heat scorched land for several kilometers around her. Despite the limitations of her precision and accuracy due to the alien environment and the imperfection of the air current manipulation system of her exo-Martial suit, she still managed to control fire very precisely.

The causality of fire was defined by the laws of thermodynamics. Heat traveled from high temperatures to low temperatures, and that was something that she could use. She used fluid dynamics to ensure that it flowed through the atmosphere in a specific manner, avoiding her friends entirely.

What was surprising, however, was the fact that the macrobes were much more resilient than she could have ever imagined. Even though she blasted them with immense heat, they didn’t vaporize in the blink of an eye like she had expected them to.

Instead, they simply shivered, struggling to survive. She could sense that they were releasing a dense cluster of ultrasonic pulses. She could sense that they were communicating with each other through the pulses.

She could directly tie them to the information of their actions and, of course, what they were perceiving around in their environments. She rapidly recorded the data, feeding it to a pattern recognition system that processed the information, allowing her to detect patterns between the sounds they made and the actions they took, along with, of course, the events unfolding around them.

On top of that, at the close range that she and the macrobes were at, her Martial Body could perceive details that none of the other four could detect, allowing notice more of what others wouldn’t be able to.

It allowed her to slowly detect the patterns that stood out more.

The macrobes that began retreating and evacuating made different sounds from the ones who stayed, who in turn seemed to be communicating different things from the ones who spewed fire.

VMMM MMM MMM!

A cacophony of incomprehensible ultrasonic sounds slowly began to make sense. They slowly began to grow more and more comprehensible. The patterns she saw allowed her to understand the macrobes better and better.

”Must… run… away…!”

”Alien… too… strong…!”

”Fire… very… intense…!”

FWOOSH

She paused her Muspelheim technique, giving the macrobes some suffuse. To her surprise, nowhere near as many macrobes died as she had expected. Although they had proven to be unable to hurt them as well as the five pathwalkers feared, they also proved to be much more resistant to fire than she had expected.

Their cell walls were tempered for heat, possessing an extremely high melting point. On top of that, their highly capable gaseous diffusion system gave them a fantastic cooling mechanism, allowing them to cool away much of the heat that would have otherwise burned or melted them.

When she finally stopped, the world slowly stopped shaking. The otherwise red land beneath her feet was reduced to lava and molten rock for kilometers around, while many fires burned with a fury.

The iron forest around them was reduced to a puddle of iron lava on the smoldering ground, getting rid of the sensory apparatus that the macrobes had used to detect them. The heat of the fire and the lava illuminated the otherwise darkening world around them due to dusk and the setting blue sun.

Most of the macrobes were gone, having run away the moment they saw Ria effortlessly harness their fire, leaving only a handful of the larger and stronger macrobes that still seemed to be maintaining their composure, whatever that meant for a single-celled organism.

”Why’d you stop?” Runark asked with a whispering voice. ”We could have broken upon a path from this point on, right? These guys clearly don’t have any intention of being nice to us.”

Ria wasn’t sure about that.

She could understand some of their words.

That meant that there was room for communication.

And if there was room for communication. Then there was potentially room for cooperation and perhaps even the scope for gathering information that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to acquire.

”Ria…?” Misha raised an eyebrow with a hint of confusion in her cybernetic eyes.

Ria simply sharpened her eyes before inhaling deeply and releasing a humming sound.

An infrasonic humming sound.

VMMM MMM MM

It seemed to send a wave of shock across the macrobes that was even greater than the shock that they received when she effortlessly commandeered their fire and threw it back at them severalfold.

She strung together sounds the meaning of which she had already managed to reverse engineer.

”Come… here… peace.”

That made several of them do what could only have been the single-celled organism equivalent of a double-take.

It was a lie, what she said.

The pathwalkers didn’t come in peace, but it was something that could plausibly be believed. Ria felt guilty lying to them. She even felt guilty about the whole operation, since it inevitably entailed the destruction of the entire world.

But alas, she couldn’t tell them that they intended to engage in an operation that would bring about the complete destruction of their planet, all in order to get their hands on exotic matter.

Instead, she chose another route.

”Seek… knowledge…” she hummed. ”Seek… information… Will… spare… lives…”

The macrobes seemed truly taken aback at her words, before the largest and seemingly the most authoritative macrobe floated forward, its outer body still smoldering lightly.

”O-mighty-otherworlders, if-you-are-so-kind-to-be-willing-to-spare-our-lives, then-we-shall-cooperate.”

Misha turned towards Ria with a confused expression. ”What’s going on? Aren’t we heading straight towards the firestorm?”

”…I think we have the opportunity to be a little bit better prepared for what we might run into,” Ria replied with a serious tone of voice. ”I don’t think it will hurt the mission to communicate with the macrobes, especially since they have already detected us.”